Aleksei Novichkov

Professional Summary

Senior Product Designer focused on B2B SaaS applications. I have 13 years of experience designing products for businesses, including a task manager, CRM, and accounting software. I excel at designing tools people rely on every day. I enjoy structuring complex features to create a clear, effective user experience.

I am also a frontend developer and design solutions that are realistic to implement and polished in the browser. This enables seamless design handoff, close collaboration with engineers, and consistently high-quality UX in production.

Employment History

Product Designer at Buddy.ai

Jun 2022 – Apr 2025 · Voice-based AI English tutor for kids, designed as an interactive, game-like experience.

Parental Experience

• Onboarding Optimization: I led a comprehensive redesign of the parental onboarding process, resulting in significant improvements in trial and purchase conversion rates.
• Compliance and Certification: Ensured COPPA compliance in the mobile app UI and helped obtain kidSAFE certification.
• Paywall Experimentation: Conducted extensive A/B testing on paywall designs, learning from both successful and unsuccessful tests.
• Complete Website Redesign: Completely redesigned the company website, aligning it with different audience segments (English as a foreign language, Early learning program, and Speech therapy). This new structure boosted traffic and enabled more effective marketing experiments.

Kids’ Experience

• Voice interaction engagement & clarity: I designed a prominent, playful “Magic of Voice” indicator that clearly signals listening states, reduces confusion about turn-taking, and makes voice input feel safe and inviting. To reinforce this behavior, we linked immediate rewards to spoken responses.
• Retention improvement: Integrated rewards into daily dialogues to encourage habitual use and improve short- and long-term retention.

Product Design Lead at Finolog

Mar 2016 – Jan 2022 · Accounting platform for small businesses with automated bank imports, cash flow forecasting, and financial reporting.

Product Design

• As the sole designer in the early stages, I defined the product’s UX, UI, and visual language, and led it from an MVP to a mature SaaS tool.
• Planned and conducted multiple in-depth UX research studies. These insights shaped core product flows, reduced onboarding friction, and informed several roadmap cycles.
• Hired, mentored, and led a junior product designer, building Finolog’s first in-house design function.
• Redesigned key flows to help users reach their “a-ha moment” faster — particularly the journey from data aggregation to generating their first Cashflow report.
• User onboarding: Interviewed newly converted customers, identified their goals and early struggles, and created onboarding guides (using Intercom Product Tours and custom UI) to support activation and reduce support load.
• Created the initial help-center content and product explanations before a support team existed, giving users a reliable foundation for self-service onboarding.

Frontend Development

• Contributed hands-on as a frontend developer (Vue.js) for several product features during the early startup stage.
• Built and maintained the Finolog marketing website using Nuxt.

Communication & Marketing Design

• Owned visual direction across product and marketing.
• Supervised freelance designers and maintained visual consistency.
• Designed the main website, multiple promo pages, and visual communication materials.
• Helped launch numerous educational initiatives, including courses teaching financial accounting for small businesses; educational programs for financial consultants using Finolog.

Lead Product Designer at Megaplan

Nov 2014 – Mar 2016 · Leading B2B SaaS platform in the Russian market for CRM, task, and project management used by small and mid-sized companies.

• I have completed the design of the new Megaplan mobile app, which the previous lead designer had started.
• Hired and mentored two designers at the company.
• Before leaving, I developed a design concept for Megaplan’s evolution, which became the basis for the service’s current design.

Product Designer at Megaplan

Jan 2012 – Nov 2014

Megaplan CRM redesign

• Redesigned core CRM modules (Clients, Deals), contributing to the launch of a modernized UI used by thousands of SMB teams.
• Simplified complex CRM workflows by reducing redundant settings, roles, and edge cases that had accumulated over years of feature growth.
• Collaborated closely with product managers and engineers to evolve the CRM while maintaining backward compatibility for existing customers.

Zettaplan task-manager (initially Megaplan 2)

• Contributed to the design of Zettaplan, a next-generation collaboration platform focused on tasks, projects, and contextual communication.
• Redesigned the core task experience multiple times, optimizing for high-frequency actions such as commenting, delegation, subtasks, mentions, and file sharing.
• Helped shape an Inbox-centric workflow, enabling users to interact with tasks, discussions, and notifications in a single, unified view.
• Designed a permission and access model based on company structure, including inheritance rules that balanced simplicity and privacy needs.
• Reduced a complex role system to three clear permission levels, lowering cognitive load for admins and end users.
• Worked on information architecture and navigation, including column-based layouts, tree views, and focus management between lists and detail views.
• Contributed to a reusable components library, improving UI consistency and development speed across the product.
• Partnered closely with engineers, frequently refining interactions, micro-UX details, and UI polish directly during implementation.

Personal Projects

Compio — Owner, Designer & Developer

Jul 2026 – Present

Designed and developed an offline-capable notebook calculator PWA with reusable values, unit conversions, multiple documents, and a custom calculation language built with Lezer and CodeMirror.

Optima — Owner & Developer

Oct 2016 – Dec 2024

Designed, developed, launched, and operated a commercial cross-platform text editor for macOS and Windows using Electron, React, Redux, and a Node.js backend.